Liberation movements tyb-4

by Olen Steinhauer

  “Hey, buddy,” said Gavra, smiling, but the boy didn’t answer.

  “Comrade Terzian,” said Brano, “I asked my question because the church, as the center of the Armenian community, may have some answers for us.”

  She nodded, then squeezed her son to her breast. “Sorry. I–I’ve lost the only thing I could depend on. Libarid was the one person in my life devoted completely to me-to us — and now I’m left with only a memory. I…” She kissed the crown of Vahe’s head; he rolled his eyes. “This is no fake emotion, you see. It’s real. It makes rational thought a little difficult. No-we didn’t hear about any new Armenians. We knew about Gourgen Yanikian, of course, like everybody, but that’s America for you. America encourages people to do things like shoot each other.” She paused. “But I don’t know anyone who approved of Yanikian’s killings.”

  Then she started to cry, but her son smiled at them, as if to say, Look at her, would you?

  At the Militia station, Katja was standing by the window, alone. She looked up as they entered and said, “Any leads?”

  “No,” Brano said before Gavra could open his mouth. “And you? Any luck at the hotel?”

  She wagged a finger at him. “The desk clerk told me you’d already been there. Would you call that a lead?”

  “Perhaps,” said Brano, then went to his desk and began to dial the phone.

  Once Brano was looking in the other direction, Katja raised her eyebrows at Gavra and pointed at the door, before walking out through it.

  The old man was hunched over the mouthpiece, talking quietly to someone as Gavra followed her out.

  He found her on the front steps, smoking a cigarette. “What’s going on?”

  “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get a drink.”

  She led him to the underground parking lot and took a Militia Skoda. She drove them to a smoky cafe-bar on October Square. On the way, she only said, “I’m not going to talk to the old bastard. Only to you. Because I know you’ll work with me on this. Am I right?”

  “Yes,” said Gavra, unsure. “Of course.”

  They said hello to Max and Corina-the couple gave discounts to the Militia, which made their cafe popular with the station-and ordered palinkas. Gavra waited for the drinks, then carried them to the window table where Katja sat.

  She smiled-Katja often smiled at Gavra, and he worried that she was flirting with him. He knew she had difficulties in her marriage, and in Gavra’s experience marital troubles raised the chances he’d find himself in the embarrassing situation of fending off a female advance. Women sensed something in him that, unlike their men at home, was unthreatening.

  She hadn’t invited him out for anything like that, though. “Brano thought he trumped me by letting me go to the hotel when he’d already been. But the old comrade doesn’t quite know everything.”

  Gavra leaned closer.

  “He asked the staff if the Armenians had talked to anyone while they were there-phone calls, meetings in their rooms-and they hadn’t. But I found a very cooperative desk clerk who seemed to like me. I had him go through their records again, and he came up with this.”

  She produced a slip of paper marked

  Hotel Metropol

  MESSAGE TIME: 23:44

  TO: Emin Kazanjian FROM: Cd. Martrich

  Gavra took it. “No message, no first name?” He turned the paper to look at its blank reverse. “Just Comrade Martrich?”

  She shrugged.

  “Why didn’t they give this to Brano?”

  “Because,” she said, “the message never reached the hijackers. Comrade Martrich called after they had checked out and left for the airport. Look at the time.”

  “About an hour before-”

  “-the plane took off,” she said. “But that’s nothing. I thought the name was familiar, so I went back to Flight 54’s passenger manifest. Tenth line down, Zrinka Martrich.”

  “A woman? On the same flight?”

  Katja looked very pleased with herself. “So I sent Imre to Victory Square to look up her file. Almost nothing there at all. But just try to guess her last known address.”

  “What?”

  “Guess!” She was enjoying this.

  “I don’t know,” said Gavra.

  Katja placed her hands flat on the table. “A mental asylum, just outside Vuzlove. The Tarabon Residential Clinic.”

  Gavra opened his mouth but was too stunned to speak.

  She said, “I’m thinking this woman was insane.”

  “An insane accomplice to hijacking?”

  Katja shrugged. “Now you.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes. Tell me what you and the Com rade have learned.”

  Which is what he did.

  Katja

  The stewardess smiled when I asked for water, but that was twenty minutes ago, and now she’s talking to the fat man in first class. He flicks his little red star self-consciously, flirting, and the stewardess is so flattered she’s forgotten my drink.

  There’s a middle-aged man snoring beside me. Before passing out he tried to start a conversation, informing me that he was to meet with some extremely important Turks to discuss exporting locally made electric fans. “We’re famous for manufacturing the best fans in the region, did you know that? Better even than the Poles, and they’re admirable competition.”

  “Interesting,” I told him, then turned away and asked for water.

  His face is now pressed into the cushion of the headrest, his mouth flaccid and damp.

  Up front, the stewardess laughs liltingly.

  So I wave until she notices, touches the fat man’s sleeve to ask his patience, and walks over.

  “Yes?” The stewardess squats beside me, showing off her intense brown eyes.

  “That water, please.”

  “Water?”

  “Yes. I asked for water a while ago.”

  “I see,” she says, though it’s plain she doesn’t. “I was just getting that.”

  Or maybe, I think as the stewardess continues to the rear of the plane, it’s just that unreliable sense of time. Maybe I did only just ask for the water, and the stewardess has decided I’m one of the troublesome passengers, one of the bitches.

  As if to confirm this, the fat man grunts and twists in his seat so he can get a good look at me.

  I find myself wishing the fan salesman awake. Conversation would at least distract me from the fact that I’m having trouble remembering the last week. There are details-the explosion of the Turkish Airlines flight. The insane asylum. And the trail leading to a dead woman and her brother, Adrian. Adrian Martrich. And, of course, Gavra.

  Out of the week there are only three vivid faces that remain with me, all men. Gavra, Adrian, and him. But I’ve lost track of what connects them all. Why were we protecting Adrian Martrich? Gavra never would explain anything in detail. Soon after the investigation started he became cold and uncommunicative.

  And then, two days ago, Adrian Martrich suggested we go out for a drive. “Where?”

  He shrugged. “To someplace I think you’ll be interested in.”

  A voice is speaking to me.

  It’s the stewardess, holding a plastic cup. “You did want water, right?”

  “Of course. Thank you.”

  The stewardess hands it over, smiles briefly, and returns to the fat man, shaking her head as she speaks to him.

  I drink the whole cup in one go and crush it into the pocket of the next seat.

  There is a part of me that tries not to remember that short trip with Adrian Martrich, because when I recall its details I shake and the surety of what I’m doing begins to collapse. So I jump to Wednesday morning-this morning-when I called the Militia station. Imre, that poor dunce, had spent the last week completely in the dark; I treated him with the same silence Gavra gave me, and when I called I was in no mood to fill him in. “Get me Brano Sev.”

  “Brano?” said Imre.

  “Just get him, will you?”

  Imre timi
dly called for our Ministry officer to please take the phone.

  “Sev here.”

  “This is Katja.”

  “Good morning, Katja.”

  “Where’s Gavra?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t heard from him.”

  “Can we meet?”

  “You don’t want to speak in the office?”

  “No.”

  He sighed. “Can you make it to the Hotel Metropol at noon?” He sounded so much more accommodating than he naturally was. “The bar.”

  Gavra

  Saturday morning Gavra cleaned himself and put on his dress uniform. He’d never felt comfortable in it, because, as he left Unit 16, his neighbors, including Mujo and his closest friend, Haso (already drunk, though it was only nine o’clock), paused to watch him pass.

  He met the others at the Seventh District cemetery, where the tight crabgrass clung to the earth, and waited as Chief Brod said a few clumsy words in front of the hole, then stepped back to let two young recruits shoot rifles into the air. There was nothing left of Libarid Terzian to bury; inside the cheap coffin lay Libarid’s best suit, cleaned and pressed by Zara the day before.

  Gavra shook little Vahe’s hand as if he were now a man, then turned to Zara, who looked away as he spoke.

  “My condolences, Zara. And I’m sorry if yesterday-”

  “Don’t,” she said, then rubbed her arm.

  So he withdrew past Katja and Imre, to where Brano stood on the edge of the crowd in civilian clothes. He held a newspaper under his arm and wore his hat, which struck Gavra as impolite. “Were you close to him?” he asked Brano.

  When the old man spoke, his lips didn’t move. “We worked in the same office for three decades. We knew each other. I’m not sure you could say we were close.”

  Gavra surveyed the mourners. There were a lot of people he didn’t know, Libarid’s friends from outside the station. Armenians mostly, like his wife’s family, remnants of various exoduses from greater Turkey in the early part of the century. They didn’t look like terrorists. He said, “Katja and I are going to Vuzlove after this.”

  Brano squinted. “Why?”

  “A woman from Flight 54 called and left a message for the hijackers at the hotel.”

  “Who told you this?”

  “Katja uncovered it. The call was made not long before the flight took off, and if the woman knew the hijackers, she had to know they weren’t in the hotel-they were with her, in the airport. Interesting, no?” When Brano didn’t answer, he added, “Her last address was a mental asylum in Vuzlove.”

  Brano blinked a few times. “Mental asylum?”

  “I’ll let you know if anything turns up.”

  “Name?”

  “Eh?”

  “This woman’s name.”

  “Martrich,” said Gavra. “Zrinka Martrich.”

  Brano ran his tongue behind his lips, then nodded.

  “You know her?”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t want you to waste too much time on this. It’s disturbing that someone we knew was a victim of this tragedy, but in the end it’s exactly what it looks like: a hijacking that went wrong.”

  “I’d still like to know why the plane exploded.”

  “People make mistakes all the time, Gavra. Even terrorists.”

  Brano handed him the morning’s Spark. The front page told him that, during their interrogation of Wilhelm Adler, Brano had been right about Stockholm. Though Adler’s revolutionary comrades once again showed their frustration by shooting Doctor Heinz Hillegart, the West German economic attache, no concessions were made by the Swedish authorities. Then, at midnight, the TNT they’d piled in the embassy basement exploded, killing Ulrich Wessel of the Red Army Faction. Everyone else, hostages included, survived. The cause of the explosion was cited as “bad wiring.”

  “Mistakes are made every day,” said Brano, just before he walked across the grass to his car.

  Katja drove at top speed along the dusty roads east of the Capital, and Gavra asked why her husband, Aron, hadn’t shown up at the funeral-he did, after all, know Libarid. She admitted that they’d been fighting. “He’s a good man, though.”

  “You wouldn’t have married him otherwise.”

  “I might have. Maybe I wouldn’t have if I’d known how weak he was. He’s desperate for me to find a safe job and have a baby.”

  “And that’s not what you want?”

  “What about you? Why aren’t you married?”

  “No time,” he said quickly. Then: “I’m not sure I’d want to bring someone into this kind of life.”

  She tapped the wheel. “You’re different, though. You’re not like those other Ministry characters. You don’t try to intimidate everyone like Brano does. I don’t know how you can work with that man.”

  “He’s my mentor-I see a side of him no one else sees.”

  “I’d rather not see him at all.”

  Gavra let the silence sit between them, and he knew why: A small part of him was trying intimidation. Stay silent, and let her project her fears onto you. He only spoke when they saw the sign for Vuzlove on the side of the road. “We’re here.”

  An old man with a white beard gave them directions to the clinic on the north side of town, and they parked beside a lone concrete box in the middle of a grassy field, surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence-the Tarabon Residential Clinic.

  “Listen, Gavra,” Katja said as she removed the ignition key. “If I insulted you back there-”

  “It’s nothing.” He waved a hand casually, but as he climbed out a smile crept into his face. He was finally getting the hang of it.

  The front office was a depressing affair, with two white-smocked matrons in front of a wall of file cabinets, filling ashtrays and watching a black-and-white television in the corner. It was half past three on a Saturday, and like most of the country they were tuned to Family Popa, about the difficult but virtuous lives of the members of that ideal socialist family. Gavra had watched it only once and had been irritated by its forced internationalism. While the family’s ethnicity was Romanian, they went out of their way to name the children Laszlo (Hungarian), Frantisek (Czech), Nastasiya (Ukrainian), and Elwira (Polish).

  Katja waved her Militia documents, but neither woman stood as she explained what she needed.

  “Eh?” said the closest one.

  Gavra took out his Ministry certificate, hoping that would help. It did.

  It was intimidating.

  The head nurse stood with some effort, finally noticing their dress uniforms. “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear what you asked for.”

  Gavra said, “We’re interested in the records of a patient with the family name of Martrich.”

  She put out her cigarette. “First name?”

  “Zrinka.”

  The nurse went to the wall of drawers and opened M-P, then returned with two files: MARTRICH P and MARTRICH S. But the two names were PAUL and SANDOR.

  “Zrinka,” said Katja. “We’re looking for a female patient.”

  “Well, these aren’t women,” said the nurse.

  “I know.”

  “And they’re the only Martriches here.”

  Gavra leaned on the counter. “Could she be filed somewhere else?”

  “If it’s not here-”

  “Zrinka?” said the other nurse, her eyes still on the television. “She’s been gone three years.”

  “Where’s her file?” said Katja.

  “Arendt,” said the one at the television.

  “Arendt?” Gavra asked.

  The first nurse shrugged. “Doctor Arendt. You think so, Klara?”

  “He was Zrinka’s doctor,” said Klara.

  “Can we speak to the doctor?” Gavra asked.

  “Not here you can’t,” Klara said to the television.

  The other nodded. “He’s in the Capital. Left how many?”

  “Eight.”

  “That’s right. Eight months ago. Took his patients’ files w
ith him.”

  “You find the doctor,” said Klara, “and you’ll find your file.”

  “And where,” Gavra said, “do we find the doctor?”

  The first nurse hesitated. “Well…”

  Klara didn’t take her eyes off the screen. “Bottom drawer, next to the thumbtacks.”

  Doctor Arendt lived in an airy third-floor Habsburg apartment over a post office, facing a cobbled Fifth District street. When he opened the door, he froze for an instant in the face of the two uniforms.

  “What can I do for you?”

  Katja gave him a reassuring smile. “Just a few questions, Comrade Doctor. About an old patient of yours. May we come in?”

  Arendt recovered from his surprise and ushered them in. Once they reached the living room, he offered tea, which Katja accepted but Gavra didn’t; he was still working on the subtleties of intimidation.

  Arendt was an old man, and when he brought Katja’s tea, some spilled into the saucer. He settled in his musty purple armchair and put on a smile. Gavra couldn’t decide whether it was true or not-this man was a psychologist, so it could have meant anything.

  Katja sipped her tea, then said, “We’d like to see the file on a patient of yours. Zrinka Martrich.”

  Arendt shrugged. “I haven’t seen her in three years.”

  “Still,” said Gavra, “we’d like to see the file.”

  Arendt climbed out of his chair again and went to a wardrobe standing by the bedroom door. Inside were rows of out-of-date files. Zrinka Martrich’s folder was thick, covering the seven years, Arendt explained, that she was kept at the Tarabon Residential Clinic. Gavra began to leaf through the heady mix of typed and handwritten memos, cardiograms, dietary records, and interview transcripts but closed it again. “Can you just tell us about her?”

  He was back in the chair, placing a glass ashtray on its arm. He lit a cigarette-Kent, Gavra noticed. American, the preferred brand of all doctors. Arendt said, “Zrinka arrived at the Tarabon clinic a decade ago, back in sixty-five. Fifteen years old. She’d been through a tragedy-both her parents committed suicide. The experience, as you’d imagine, scarred her. She blamed herself.”

  “She thought she murdered them?” asked Katja.

  “In a way, yes. You see, Zrinka believed she had influenced them.” He paused, touching his lip, smoke rising into his eyes. “This is going to sound ludicrous to you.”